Fun Food Day

It seems like I have a lot of food-related posts when we are in Turkey. What can I say, the food culture is very strong here … lots of restaurants and cafés and patisseries. As a family, we enjoy visiting our favorites … and checking out new places to see if we can grow our “favorites” list.

Today, we started our day with breakfast, joining Aylin & Murat, and mom and Deniz at Léone, a French-themed patisserie. This was a pre-reward for mom, Aylin & Murat, who then went to get their COVID-19 booster shots.

Sandy, our neighbor in Colorado makes beautifully decorated cookies. When Aylin and mom were visiting us in 2019, they got to taste some of the Christmas cookies Sandy sent over. I had thought about ordering cookies to take with me to Turkey this year, but the timing did not work out. No worries. Aylin found some at a Turkish patisserie. She had us over for afternoon tea today so we could test-drive the cookies. Yummy!

We continued our food-themed day with dinner at Paprica … an Italian restaurant just a few steps down the street from mom’s condo. The food is always good here … and the service as well. Murat made reservations in the indoors section … we had the whole room to ourselves. I usually have pasta, but opted for the Paprica Beef Special, which is not unlike çökertme kebabı … small chunks of beef served over shredded fried potatoes with yogurt and tomato sauce. We ordered the caramel cake to share six-ways just to refresh our palates. We were so enjoying our meal that I, alas, forgot to take photos!Read more